The Informant!

Saturday 21 November 2009 19.07 EST
First published on Saturday 21 November 2009 19.07 EST

Matt Damon gives the best performance of his career so far in this true story of Mark Whitacre, an overweight, moustachioed, highly paid, high-flying executive for a major agri-business corporation in the American Midwest who, in 1992, blew the whistle on his employers for worldwide price fixing. For the next three years, he worked closely with the FBI and the Justice Department gathering evidence against his firm and seemingly putting his career at risk. But his whistle contained a cracked pea or two and at times gave out a high-pitched, off-key sound to which his government minders turned a deaf or tin ear.

Gradually, they and we come to suspect that Mark may not be exactly the straight-up guy with a troubled conscience he presents himself as. Is he perhaps a charming, plausible psychopath of a kind most of us have come across at some time in our lives, if in a smaller way? It's a confident, jaunty film that leaves us feeling sympathetic towards both the federal investigators and Whitacre's devious associates.